No Words

Sweet Baby,

I had to buy a sympathy card the other day. I must have stood at the store staring at sympathy cards for at least 15 minutes searching for the perfect one. Tears filled my eyes as I read through each card and remembered how hard those initial weeks after losing you were to get through.

Before losing you, if I had an occasion to buy a sympathy card, I would typically look for a card with a pretty cover and a reference to a bible verse on the inside. Back then, my understanding of what it was like to lose someone so precious, someone you had never imagined having to live without, someone who had changed your life, well, it was non-existent. I wish that I could still be so blissfully ignorant. But as I looked through those sympathy cards the other day, I struggled to find one that didn't seem to trivialize such a great loss.  “Thinking of You/Praying for you”,  “With Deepest Sympathy”, and “May God Give You Comfort”...they are well-intended phrases, but they can come across as so cliche and empty.

I decided after reading just about every card in the store that no perfect sympathy card exists. There are simply no words that can take away someone's pain or give someone back the person that they love. I bought a card anyway, because I remembered how comforting it was to open cards in those first few weeks after losing you. No matter what the cards said, they let me know that someone was thinking of Daddy and me. I kept every single card, and there are days when I pull them out and read through them again. It is the messages on the inside of the cards that mean the most. One of my favorite cards is one that contains no words on it other than this handwritten note on the inside followed by a signature, "There are no words."

Yesterday, I got the sweetest text from a friend who said that her family had been thinking about you. She said they'd heard a song that I quoted not so long ago in a letter to you, and that the lyrics had brought tears to their eyes:

"It ain't fair; you died too young,
Like a story that had just begun,
But death tore the pages all away.
God knows how I miss you,
All the hell that I've been through,
Just knowin' no one could take your place.
And sometimes I wonder,
Who'd you be today?" (Who You'd Be Today, Kenny Chesney)

She ended her message by saying, "I hope you know how much everyone in this world misses and thinks of Morris." There may not be a perfect sympathy card, and there may be no words for times like this in life, but messages like that one are as close to perfect as it gets.

Love,

Mommy